I am delighted by Christopher Holdsworth's review, particularly because he recognizes that my Abelard has two intended audiences: students for whom it is an introduction to medieval history and literature, and experts who may be stimulated by it to take particular questions much further than I do.

Over the past few years, no doubt as a consequence of HIV/AIDS newspapers have been full of stories about the threat from plagues some such as TB and bubonic plague appear like spectres from the past while apparently new diseases such as E-coli and the Ebola virus threaten to run riot in the future. It is against such a background that Christopher Wills has published Plagues.

Galley’s review misses the point, I think, and there seems to be large parts of the book that he either did not read or simply did not understand. The problem, I suspect, has to do with the infamous two cultures and the divide between them.

Recent years have seen a blossoming of secondary literature on medieval queens and queenship, a development which owes much to the impetus provided by Pauline Stafford’s path-breaking study, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers: The King’s Wife in the Early Middle Ages (1983). Several essay collections, including J. C. Parsons ed., Medieval Queenship (1993) and A. J.

The reviewer of Eleanor of Provence must at times have been troubled by a justified assumption that the author herself had read many books which made frequent use of the terms 'gender' 'female lifecycle', 'female networking', 'peaceweavers' and the like.

This is a very welcome paperback edition of Euan Green’s monograph originally published in 1995. The enviable task confronting the author is to write a further book of a similar quality; expectations are certain to be high for The Crisis of Conservatism is not simply an outstanding account but to use an overworked word, a seminal book.

I appreciated Alan O'Day's review of The Crisis of Conservatism and I welcome this chance to engage with his positions. For the most part I found very little to quarrel with in Alan O'Day's generous and helpfully serious appraisal of my book, but there are one or two points where I would take issue. Let me get a minor grievance out of the way first.